‘For Esme – with Love and Squalor’, by JD Salinger

Whilst I’m on the mid-century Americans, here’s someone who wasn’t in the Granta book. The reason he isn’t is because at some point in the 1960s Salinger stopped giving permission for his stories to be anthologized. As a result I came to his collection For Esme with Love and Squalor (or Nine Stories, as it was in the US) late – a shame, because they are completely wonderful. The title story takes the form of an American soldier’s recollection of meeting a child, Esme, in a café whilst billeted in a rainy part of England just before D-Day. She asks him to write her a story that is ‘extremely squalid and moving’ and this, we understand, is that story. It has many of the Salinger tropes – a traumatised young man, a precocious child, a thick vein of melancholy as well as a dash of sentimentality. Cheever was reportedly jealous of Salinger and it’s easy to see why. As a writer it is difficult not to be both dismayed and joyful at the pure and apparently effortless talent on display.

First published in The New Yorker (1950), and collected in Nine Stories (the US title; elsewhere the collection takes its name from this story)